Saturday, October 01, 2011

Election debates

Our local tv station was re-airing the election debates it sponsored today so we watched the debate for our region. Only the major parties were represented at this debate and that was fine with us as those are the only ones we're interested in hearing from. There are no real issues going on in this election so all we can use to base our votes on is the overall platform for the parties and the way the candidates presented themselves.

Our PC candidate is the former weatherman for a local television station and personally, I found him to be a bit pompous. He stuck to the party line which seemed to be mostly about denigrating the Liberal party. I know the Liberals didn't keep all of their promises but there was a global recession going on and that's enough reason for me to absolve the Liberal party for breaking their promises.

The Liberal party candidate was well-spoken and while he also stuck to the party line, he didn't spend nearly as much time denigrating the other parties. I respected that. The NDP candidate is young and went into politics because of Jack Layton's historic win; he has no experience in politics. The Green candidate also has no experience in politics.

So I'm left with a comparison of their policies; our local paper has a good point-by-point breakdown of their platforms.

Ultimately, I don't know who will get my vote on Thursday although I have my theories. I'll definitely be voting one way or another.

I do have to say that there's one thing I really dislike about this election: the use of auto-dialers calling us to (automatically) run polls or send messages. It wouldn't be so bad if they only called only once a day but they've been calling multiple times per day. Worse, even if I do answer the phone there's no one there. In the debate the PC candidate said that they had to use auto-dialers to reach more people.Can the auto-dialers be reaching more people if they're not working?

I'd mind the calls less if they were from real people who were there when I answered the phone. Sometimes new technology isn't good technology.